We Were Liars Analysis

Cadence lives in Burlington, Vermont during the school year, but the bulk of the action in We Were Liars takes place on a fictitious island called Beechwood. The island is off the coast of Massachu...

We get the details in We Were Liars straight from Cadence, pulling us inside her mind as she struggles to navigate it. She begins the book by telling us who she is in as straightforward a way as po...

Lockhart is a well-known young adult author, and We Were Liars is published by Delacorte, the young adult imprint of Random House. (An imprint is a smaller publisher within a larger publisher that...

From the opening pages of We Were Liars, you know something bad is going to happen. On the very first page, Cadence says: It doesn't matter if there's a cluster of pill bottles on the bedside table...

We Were Liars is a short book with short chapters—some are no more than half a page long, and none are longer than three pages. Most of the story is written in your standard prose style, with com...

When introducing Johnny, Mirren, and Gat in We Were Liars, Cadence says, "The family calls us four the Liars, and probably we deserve it […] Most years on the island, we've been trouble" (4.2). A...

At the end of We Were Liars, Cadence returns to the beginning. She repeats the passage that opens Chapter 2: My full name is Cadence Sinclair Eastman.I live in Burlington, Vermont, with Mummy and t...

The writing in We Were Liars is sparse and poetic, but the plot is intricate, full of twists and turns. This is one of those books where you hit the last page, say, "Wait, what?" and start over. Th...

What, Doesn't Everybody Have an Island?On the surface, Cadence Sinclair's life appears to be pretty sweet. Not only does she live in a big, fancy house in Vermont, her family also owns an island...

The kind of amnesia Cadence has is known as dissociative or psychogenic amnesia and it is caused by stress hormones released during trauma. (Source.) After the fire, Cadence goes to a hospital on M...

There's no sex in We Were Liars, only a couple of tame make-out scenes and a mention of "sexual intercourse" with a fake boyfriend. Cadence and Gat lie in her bed and kiss in one scene, and they ge...

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (7.11)Shakespeare, King Lear (17.15)Diana Wynne Jones , Charmed Life (27.9)Diana Wynne Jones, The Lives of Christopher Chant (27.11)Emily Bronte, Wuthering H...